“TRAVERSE” Exhibition
William Holman Gallery
This event has ended.
William Holman Gallery presents TRAVERSE, curated by Rebecca Bird, Peter Bonner and Farideh Sakhaeifar, which includes works by eleven artists : Lee Etheredge IV, Bruce Gagnier, Frantiska + Tim Gilman, Baseera Khan, Charles Koegel, Beth Livensperger, Dana Levy, Leah Raintree, Margot Spindelman, Dov Talpaz, and Heeseop Yoon.
Their contributions take the form of drawings, paintings, photography, sculpture and video.

The original word from Latin ‘transversus’ meaning “turn across”, became, in the 14th century, an “act of passing through a gate, fortification or crossing a bridge”, and later as a verb to “cross an area of land or water”, and most recently in rock climbing as a sideways zig-zagging movement necessary in order to continue up or down a cliff - an essential detour.
Works in this exhibition deal with displacement, divides, over-development, setbacks, and the uncertainty of the current political, economic and cultural moment. The artists span multiple generations and hail from, or reside in, the United States, Korea, Israel, China and the Czech Republic to offer an intentionally broad range of contrasting perspectives.
In the video Brothers and Sisters, 2014-6, by Baseera Khan, a halting conversation suggests displacement and loss. Overlapping this narrative about family members is Psychic TV’s Godstar, evoking disjunction between our worlds and the impossibility of understanding the speaker’s experience. In Dov Talpaz’s War Series, 2014, mysterious small drawings of refugees glow like jewel-toned medieval glass windows. Odille, 2014 by Bruce Gagnier, is a life-size bronze figure sculpture. Who is Odille? “Odille” is not the name of a model. Gagnier works from his imagination. Odille is a figure as strange, as beautiful, as “other” as her name.

Works by Lee Etheredge IV and Charles Koegel address internationally rampant urban development from two localized perspectives. Etheredge’s large format, black and white photo, Heshahangcheng 4, 2015, documents unoccupied housing for the urbanized poor in Shanghai: a bulldozed wasteland. His use of the “obsolete” medium of film pointedly eschews the appeal of new technologies. Based on the rapid transformations of real estate in Brooklyn, Koegel’s drawing Adapted Structure, 2015, is inhabited by crane-like metallic forms that proliferate organically like viruses, cancer or kudzu. The mundane but liminal spaces of Beth Livensperger’s recent watercolors of airfields, roads and parking lots speak to the pathos of the featureless modern landscape.
Also at play in the exhibition are multiple elusive concepts of home. In Frantiska + Tim Gilman’s diptych Untitled (Curtains), 2014, the modernist house appears sublime, off balance and unable to be occupied by us, inviting a physical relationship while imposing an insurmountable distance. Dana Levy’s The Weight of Things, 2015, animates a crumbling Imperial bedroom: certainties of state, domesticity, and class embodied in the lavish furnishings accumulate into piles of ruble, a time-lapse film of a century’s decline. Heeseop Yoon’s work begins from the detritus of time that accumulates in basements and storage spaces. Her methodical additive process of drawing reveals the ethereal qualities invested in physical belongings. Leah Raintree’s elaborate process-based drawings on crumpled paper resemble non-existent terrains. Margot Spindelman’s Luminous drawings Roofs, Births and Currents in pen and gouache reveal moments of presence and clarity in the ever changing environment in which we live.
Media
Schedule
from February 17, 2016 to March 24, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-02-19 from 18:00 to 20:00